Miscellaneous Loroi question-and-answer thread

[Arioch]

OK, maybe I meant wouldn't the other players know what the "cheater" was thinking, or is it the case with sanzai that if you're not "talking" no one "hears" you?

Ordinary Loroi can't automatically read each others' minds. The nature of telepathy makes it difficult to lie about the current subject being discussed, and skilled telepaths can use an open telepathic connection to catch extra hints or outright sneak into someone's mind, but a Loroi's private thoughts are not normally open to everyone. If one Loroi asked another a telepathic question, it would be very difficult for the Loroi to answer convincingly with a telepathic lie (though she could refuse to answer, which would be telling in itself); but if no one asks her the question, it is not a lie to keep the truth to herself.

If two Loroi have a touch link, then it becomes very difficult to for one to conceal information that is sought by the other without actively blocking the other. Touch link can be an intimate sharing of contact between friends, but it's also what a stronger telepathic opponent may do to use some nasty abilities against you.

In the modern Loroi military in which everyone is (nominally) on the same side, there is a certain level of trust, and it is considered rude and a sign of deceit to speak instead of using telepathy. If you introduced a dice game to modern Loroi as an entertainment, they would probably find it interesting. But as for developing dice games themselves, these are the kind of games that develop very early in a society's history, and they often involve trying to win money from players you may not know well or like. In ancient Loroi societies in which armed conflict was often only one insult away, there was often little trust in a group that might gather to try to win each others' money in a game like dice, in which there is a monetary incentive to cheat.

To go back to a question that was put earlier in the thread (why doesn't Fireblade speak?): it is traditional for all Teidar to use telepathy instead of speech whenever possible. The first reason is as mentioned above: it's considered rude and indicates a lack of trust or an attempt at deceit. The second reason is that it's considered cowardly; you refuse a telepathic connection when you're trying to prevent a potentially unfriendly Loroi from penetrating your telepathic defenses. Teidar are "Unsheathed", ready for a fight at all times, and are not supposed to betray any fear or doubt in their own psionic abilities. This is why Teidar trainees are prohibited from speaking: so they have to develop their telepathic defenses. Therefore, when a Teidar speaks aloud to you (in a case where she could use telepathy insead), it is an open declaration of hostile intent, usually in the form of a challenge or an ultimatum.

[Hālian]

Solution: Trouble-style dice poppers?

[Arioch]

Solution: Trouble-style dice poppers?

Is the plastic bubble some kind of psionic barrier that I don't kinow about?

[Hālian]

Yes, it's very very special historian-made psi-proof plastic. That's why Trouble retails for the equivalent of $100 at our Toridas location.

[JQBogus]

Loroi random number generation for games, if needed, could be provided by drawing (identical to the touch) numbered chits from a bag.

I don't think psychometry is a thing they can do, is it?

[raistlin34]

Therefore, when a Teidar speaks aloud to you (in a case where she could use telepathy insead), it is an open declaration of hostile intent, usually in the form of a challenge or an ultimatum.

Which may become a problem, since humans like Jardin usually feel rattled about the lack of verbal communication, and tend to poke the other person into talking them back.

[dragoongfa]

Not replying to someone when directly adressed is seen as a grave insult here in Greece at least, quite possibly almost everywhere in the world from what I have observed.

It is essentially a declaration of considering the individual talking to you as beneath you, to the level of considering them an 'unperson'. Proper decorum due to culture not withstanding a human is expecting a form of responce when addressing someone.

So yeah, a Teidar not replying in any way will be seen as an insult.

[raistlin34]

Not replying to someone when directly adressed is seen as a grave insult here in Greece at least, quite possibly almost everywhere in the world from what I have observed.

It is essentially a declaration of considering the individual talking to you as beneath you, to the level of considering them an 'unperson'. Proper decorum due to culture not withstanding a human is expecting a form of responce when addressing someone.

So yeah, a Teidar not replying in any way will be seen as an insult.

Fun fact: When cops "interview" (an euphemism for interrogation) a suspect, they sometimes give him the silent treatment in order to make the guy talk to them just to break the tension (a natural reaction, specially after several hours). The more he talks (about anything, really), the more possible the detainee ends saying something it can be used against him in Court.
That 's why the first advice any lawyer will give to you when dealing with police is "keep your mouth shout".

[Razor One]

I had a mate of mine learn that one the hard way. He went for a police interview and got a bit chummy and conversational with the police, mentioned that he enjoyed action films. The contents of said conversation were then used in court against him at a later date.

Fortunately, combination of numerous character witnesses, statements, no prior record and a good solicitor and judge got him off with a six month good behaviour bond which he breezed through. Worst case scenario would have been three years in prison.

Never. Trust. A cop.

[Hālian]

What is depicted in the ceiling of Erebas' (Tempest's) bridge lobby? (page 49 panel 2)

[Arioch]

What is depicted in the ceiling of Erebas' (Tempest's) bridge lobby? (page 49 panel 2)

It's a set of constellations. I had intended to draw an esoteric pantheon of Loroi mythology (which I'd still like to add someday), but I ran out of time and just pasted in some Earth asterisms.

[Jayngfet]

How does the Loroi brain work?

I don't mean that as in "how do psychic powers work" so much as "how does the brain develop over time". I'm no neurologist but my impression of the brain is that the formative years are when the mind is best able to take in information and adapt, and that becomes far more difficult the older you get. The issue there being that the Loroi develop so quickly that they're essentially physical adults at an age where the human brain is still developing. Would it therefore follow, given just a rough idea on how the mind works, that the Loroi brain would have to progress rapidly through equivalent steps to reach an equivalent point earlier on in their lifespan.

This is just the general assumption I'm working off, given how Loroi society seems to work.

[ShadowDragon8685]

To start with, I think Loroi must assimilate skill, particularly physical and telepathic/telekinetic skills, very rapidly. This would be seen as an asset in the days of muscle-powered warfare, but it also leads to Loroi who are very young being thrust into literally life-and-death situations.

I presume that Loroi must "emotionally" age faster than humans, but I'm also guessing they do not age emotionally as fast as they do physically. Think about how young some legendary humans must have been when they were making life-and-death decisions back in the sword-and-sandal, or even plate-and-chain days. Now imagine that they were even younger, but were not only fully grown physically, but not infrequently had telekinetic powers.

Now, in a day of starships and advanced knowledge, that's kind of a handicap. 10 years simply is not enough time to achieve what is effectively a college level education, especially when you sleep as much as a human does, and that whole "kicked out into the wilds for a few years" thing is an absurd anachronism in such an environment, because it means you have a bunch of effectively wild kids that you're suddenly dragging back into the fold and trying to cram six years of military college into in the span of like, two years.

Frankly, I think the Tenoin are probably the most well-adjusted of the normal castes, under such conditions, if only because their shipboard "wild years" would be most similar to the environment in the imperial navy, and because sailing is, in fact, a technical pursuit that requires some degree of advanced knowledge, so they'd always have on-hand an older advisor. Also, they're all where they are simply because they popped out of the right womb and were physically fit enough to get through the "kicked out innawilds" phase and mentally hard enough to get with the program. The academic side of fighting a war seems to be a third priority, and the caste system is hobbling. Were you born to be a Tenoin? Sucks to be if you're much more suited to be a roboticist, you're going sailing!

Frankly, I would expect literally any TCA Ensign to be a far better-adjusted, better-educated, and most importantly, better-qualified sailor than the average Loroi fresh out of the caste mill. That would level off significantly as the ages get closer and years of experience in adult life begin to draw closer, especially since, rather unfortunately, I would expect a much higher turnover rate of young warriors, even without an active war on. When you start to get up in age, things would level out for a time, but experience would be telling; even a TCA admiral, even assuming outright life-extending medications have become available, is going to be far younger than an experienced Loroi admiral. By the time you hit the admiralty, though, I expect that, as in the youngest officerhood phases, raw innate talent has once again become the deciding factor of who gets promoted and who doesn't, so only experience will differentiate the two. The Loroi is far more likely to be highly experienced, though less so in the present timeline, if only because of the unmitigated disaster that was Sunfall's last campaign.

[Jayngfet]

I think you have a very skewed idea of what the average soldier's age was in ye olden days. An average knight wouldn't even become a squire til mid teens, and wouldn't even become a Paige until about the age a Loroi is physically an adult. Even a reasonably young knight could usually fall into what's recognizably an adult by modern human standards. You can go back further in time but the end result is usually the same. You usually don't see people on a battlefield, especially actually doing anything even vaguely related to fighting, below mid teens outside of extenuating circumstances. Mainly because having a bunch of small, impulsive people doing important jobs never works out well.

And you can't really make a case for Loroi not aging mentally at a similar rate. They're expected to jump into this kind of thing at age 10 even traditionally, and the gap between 8 and 10 is just a bit less than 18 and 21 so we can't just make the assumption either way. Particularly given that that also seems to be the age gap most Loroi reproduce at. There are enough different explanations I don't really feel comfortable making even an educated guess.

Remember, the commander of the battlegroups entire fighter squadron is thirteen years old, and is a veteran training even younger pilots. While that's obviously going to skew a bit younger than the norm due to circumstance lets also keep in mind it's not by much compared to the averages around her. Beryl is only a year older being the obvious example.

And while one could make a case for a random Ensign at eighteen being more or less rounded or adjusted than a ten year old equivalent Loroi, that's not really the most pertinent comparison once you go beyond analyzing individual characters. Remember that a yes or no either way means that it must hold true for almost every Loroi who's ever lived in the entire history of the species, and then you have to go into the big implications of that...

[Arioch]

Our closest terrestrial analogues in terms of brain development, social development and body weight (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and bottlenosed dolphins) all reach sexual maturity between 7-9 years, so it's possible even without alien biology to develop a complex adult brain within that time frime. Loroi have a lot more to learn than a dolphin, but telepathic teaching techniques can help to close this gap.

Emotional maturity, I think, is subjective and somewhat variable depending on the environment; I think many organisms will "mature" only when external forces require it. Indoor cats will essentially stay kittens (behaviorally) their whole lives if you let them, and human offspring will stay emotionally immature well into their 20's or 30's if allowed to. However, a human child of around age 8 is physically capable of most menial adult tasks (barring size or strength requirements), and young children "grow up" emotionally very quickly when the circumstances demand it. The lengthy adolescence period which we now think is absolutely necessary for proper development didn't exist prior to about 100 years ago. Loroi in the warrior castes don't have an adolescence period; they go straight from childhood into adult training at about age 6 (at which point they are developmentally equivalent to a human 13-year-old).

A 12-year-old Loroi officer candidate will have less life experience than a 22-year-old human academy graduate, but she may have more actual survival skills, having spent half her life in rigorous training. Which will be more "emotionally mature" will depend heavily on the details of each's upbringing. Both still have a lot to learn, but are capable of performing the tasks required of an entry-level combatant.

It's true that modern humans can have psychological problems in later life when exposed to trauma as young children, but that may not always have been the case. Lindybeige had an interesting video posing the question: did ancient human warriors commonly suffer from combat stress disorders? You'd think they would... ancient combat was pretty horrific, with the killing being up close and personal, but there is very little evidence in the historical record describing mental disorders resulting from combat trauma. Lindy's conclusion, which I think makes some sense, is that life for ancient people was incredibly hard from day 1, and they just coped. Seeing people brutally killed was nothing new that even a first-time solider would not have seen before. Shock and horror are all about expectations, and humans can get accustomed to almost anything.

[Jayngfet]

I assumed that, but I just wanted to confirm. Mainly because the implications of that are kind of huge once you actually work through the concept. By which I mean that while other primates, dolphins, and equivalent species can reach mental adulthood in a similar timeframe, they aren't running a stellar empire and the expectations are a bit different.

Let me reiterate: It's not about when Loroi are culturally adults or what expectations society puts on it's members, it's about what the brain is physically set up to do at what age and how it develops as a result. The brain of an adult will process information differently from the brain of a child and the cultural definitions of those terms are kind of secondary to what's physically going on with the actual meat inside the Loroi skull.

To get to the point(or rather, a point), that fact alone indicates that the Loroi idea of what they were doing when the Soia were around can't really be accurate, just going by some other assumptions everyone here has. If you started with a human and wanted to engineer it into being any kind of administrator, leader or ruler, you can't really skip over early brain development because that'll be the point when your future ruler will be best retaining the information they'll need to rule. Even if you can just broadcast information directly into the mind that doesn't really change things, because now you have half the time you'd otherwise have in order to do that.

If, however, you had a human template and needed to engineer them to do one specific thing, or a range of things, that's not really relevant. They only need the time to take in a specific set of things before you reach adulthood and the brain retains information a bit differently.

This probably isn't a huge problem for a rigid, caste based society anyway for the same reason. Each individual only needs to take on a specific amount of information to do their job.

[Arioch]

The Loroi running a stellar empire aren't 12 years old; they're generally more than 100 years old. You seem to be making an assumption that the brain can only learn during a limited early developmental period; I don't think that's really true even for humans (I've learned most of my current art skills after the age of 30), and I certainly don't see any reason why it should have to be true for an alien species with a very different biology.

Especially if you're talking about a species that has been engineered in some way. If we take the Nibiren and Barsam as an example, what you have are two species that have very similar structural and mechanical characteristics, but completely different biochemical systems that make them work. It seems that one was clearly engineered to resemble the other, but there's no reason that Nibiren developmental limitations should be any limitation on Barsam developmental processes, since they're using a completely different system. An analogy would be two versions the same painting done in oils and watercolors; they might look similar and deliberately so, but different and incompatible techniques would have to be used for each one.

[Jayngfet]

I think you aren't following what I'm saying at all. Of course you can keep learning after that point, it just becomes more difficult.

A side by side comparison would be if you took a Loroi and a Human born at the exact same time and exposed them to the same information in the same way, the Loroi might get an initial advantage for the first couple of years, but by the time they hit seven or eight years old you'd see the major differences, because the Loroi brain will have already blown past the point where it'd be retaining that information in the same way. Once you hit the teen years it becomes more pronounced, because the Loroi brain simply will not retain information in the same way. It's like learning a language. You can learn it at any age, but it's largely agreed that the brain handles information like that long before adulthood. But when a human is at that age, a Loroi is long past it. That peak window would be reduced by like half at least.

Obviously a 1:1 comparison is loaded, since Loroi have another avenue of communication that allows information to be sent faster and more clearly, so learning faster is just a matter of course. Likewise you can obviously still learn and retain information past that point, and Loroi have longer to do it. But the question was never how the Loroi as a civilization develop or how they deal with it in a practical setting, the question was just how that specific organ develops over a specific time frame. The age of the Loroi who run the show doesn't really factor into it.

Likewise, weather the Loroi themselves have ever been aware of the comparison doesn't really factor into it. The Nibren and Barsam are the obvious point of comparison, but the difference there is that we don't actually have any hard numbers regarding either species, or many real hard details on their cultures. Or rather, you do and I don't so I can't really say anything on it.

As for the analogy: Watercolor and Oil may be totally different, but in both mediums you still need time for the paint to dry properly. You can get different types of paint and use different techniques to play around with that, but you can't really consider a wet painting "done". Even if no materials are shared between them and the styles are different, some things just need to be constant. Paint needs to dry. Models need to render. So on and so forth. The same kind of applies here. Even if my assumption is off completely there'd need to be an entirely different system at play to get to an end result.

[Arioch]

A side by side comparison would be if you took a Loroi and a Human born at the exact same time and exposed them to the same information in the same way, the Loroi might get an initial advantage for the first couple of years, but by the time they hit seven or eight years old you'd see the major differences, because the Loroi brain will have already blown past the point where it'd be retaining that information in the same way. Once you hit the teen years it becomes more pronounced, because the Loroi brain simply will not retain information in the same way. It's like learning a language. You can learn it at any age, but it's largely agreed that the brain handles information like that long before adulthood. But when a human is at that age, a Loroi is long past it. That peak window would be reduced by like half at least.

You seem to be assuming that Loroi brain development works exactly the same way as human brain development works, and I don't see any reason to make that assumption about an alien biology.

[Jayngfet]

You're mistaking the entire original question for an assumption.